The Braille Encyclopedia
A book review
The Braille Encyclopedia by Naomi Cohn
Rose Metal Press, Brookline
160 pages. $15.95
A Love Letter to Braille for the Sighted
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When you encounter a new book, judging it by its cover is both a cliché and a truism, but a book’s title also creates its own expectations. From the title of the new book, The Braille Encyclopedia by Naomi Cohn, you expect a nonfiction book that will school you on all things braille: all the dry with none of the juice. But Cohn’s book is packed with juicy humanity. It’s a long love letter to braille, and its creator Louis Braille, told as a prose poem abecedarian memoir.
The expectation from the title, that you are getting a deep dive into the vocabulary and history of braille written in a formal, stuffy style, is burst as soon as you get to the table of contents. It’s alphabetical, but instead of vocabulary, there are impressions as keywords such as, “Evil Eye, Jealousy, Umami, Yellow.”
It’s your first clue you’re in for an experiential treat packed with sensory detail. It piques your curiosity because what does the umami flavor have to do with braille? Do blind people secretly lick pages? Why is yellow there? I thought if you’re blind, you can’t see color? I’m not visually impaired myself so these were thoughts that came to me. There are many other questions one could have just based on the table of contents that make you want to keep reading for answers.
The book both adheres to, and breaks, formal conventions in its blended style. Cohn grew up loving encyclopedias personally. In “Motivation,” she describes how much she loved her,
“20 glorious volumes…of The International Wildlife Encyclopedia: An Illustrated Library of All the Animals, Birds, Fish, Insects and Reptiles of the World.”
The volumes made such an impression on her that she repurchased them as an adult, trying to find a reference for a worm that kept appearing in her writing; a story she relates in the entry “Zorro.”
Professionally, she became a “copy editor, proofreader, and fact checker for Encyclopedia Britannica.” She’s well aware of what encyclopedias traditionally do, but in this case, she’s using the convention of the encyclopedia as a structure to tell her story. She even says in her Author’s Note,
“What started as a form of support has become the form itself: the armature has become the sculpture.”
To ground you firmly in the land of memoir with its first-person point of view and Cohn’s narrative voice, the first entry, “Academia,” is Cohn’s biography with books. In her words, she grew up swimming in an ocean of words,
“I am made of words, the organized chaos of text, ant colonies of characters streaming over paper, each letter coalescing into ever greater meaning with its sisters…My mother’s milk was also words—linguistics and semantics, etymology and syntax, grammar and glottal stop.”
It sets the stakes for you immediately because what is a sighted reader’s most precious tool, engaged even before their imagination, their sight. Cohn lost her vision in midlife. While she grew up wearing glasses, like all us visual readers, as a kid, she took her vision for granted. The book is meant for sighted readers as an invitation into the world of the blind. As sighted people, we assume blindness is about loss, but she’s inviting us into her transition and then settlement into new ways of experiencing words and how braille keeps her in a “gorgeous lake of silence,” yet “fully in the world of the book.”
The book deviates from memoir form with its encyclopedic structure, but not in its themes. Proper names in reference books are usually reserved for famous people, historical or fictional. The everyday unsung heroes of our lives aren’t celebrated in encyclopedias. Cindy was Cohn’s braille instructor. Of course, Cohn appreciated the coaching, but she also sees braille as connecting people through touch. She says in “Fingers…
We reach toward each other with words—outstretched like fingers.”
“Cindy” earned her place in the collection by fostering intimacy.
“Slivovitz” (plum brandy) and “Yahrzeit” (a death memorial candle) cover Cohn’s Jewish heritage and spirituality. Heritage and spirituality are often front and center in a memoir, but Cohn offers these as vignettes.
It’s clear the whole book is some variety of short-form writing by the third entry, “Between.” It’s not pure encyclopedia. It’s not pure memoir. It’s not just creative flash nonfiction, there’s an element of prose poetry as well. Cohn says,
“Line often separates poetry from prose, line being a tool that poets often use, that prose writers, mostly, do not. I live lost in the few millimeters between lines of braille, lost between poetry and prose, lost in the zone between total sight and total blindness.”
Lost between levels of visual acuity, poetry, and prose, she leans into the form of prose poetry to tell her story. The prose poem is also a box, a container, similar to how a braille cell contains information. In her Author’s Notes, she shares she started most of the pieces as “linked prose poems,” but more and more prose crept in.
Poetry blurring the boundary of creative nonfiction shows in entries such as,
“Button…Or another knot I didn’t tug snug wags like a dog’s stumpy tail.”
Or, in “Common Pillbug,” comparing the bugs to braille dots,
“something closed and round under my finger that—with patience—opens up.”
Or “Memory” which describes her non-visual coping mechanisms,
“Passwords, birthdays, anniversaries, restaurant menus, poems. Piece of cake, cake my memory would eat.”
Poetry is also a large tent that makes room for the visual reinforcement of ideas. Each letter of Cohn’s alphabet includes a graphic representation of the letter in braille before its section heading. The grid of dots reinforces the box of prose poetry as well as factually teaching you the braille letters.
Only 10% of blind people read braille, Cohn tells you in “Contraction.” “Gadget” and “Homophone” make it clear audiobooks are much more readily available and wonderfully fast compared to braille texts. But, it’s essential to Cohn that you, as the reader, understand the lived experience of using braille. Touching what you read is an embodied experience in a way that listening to a text is not. Braille lets you ingest, absorb, be grounded in what you read instead of being pulled in many directions by audio. “Cell” shares,
“Touching my reading educates me on my place in the world, feet in shoes, weight of foot on ground, weight of bones and flesh in chair.”
I was grabbed by the commonality all people with disabilities and health challenges face. As a reader, I’m not living with vision loss, but I am making my way with disease progression into disability. “Blood” shares her sense of self as a sighted person,
“…One who noticed fine detail: a painter, sculptor, print-maker, quilter, an addicted reader of print, a bird-watcher, a finder of missing commas and extra typographical spaces, a finder of small things dropped on a dark floor. “
We all take our personalities and interests as fixed parts of our identity until our health makes us reevaluate who we think we are. Cohn shares in moving detail her personal rewriting of who she thinks she is as she progresses through stages of blindness and ease of use with braille.
“Zutz” brings the book to a satisfying close. It shares her father’s history with the word, zutz’s Yiddish relationship to braille, and how braille literally connects the dots in Cohn’s experiences with blindness.
Cohn clearly loves braille. Everyone else should love it too after reading the book because “Diagnosis” tells us,
“Everybody wants—and loses—something different.”
Since none of us knows what those losses will be, we can all learn something from other people’s grace.
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